UN Aid Official Calls For Urgent Help In Iraq

Escalating Violence In Iraq Prompts UN Aid Official To Call
For Urgent Help From Leaders

New York, Oct 11 2006
3:00PM

The violence inside Iraq has “spiralled totally
out of control,” the United Nations’ top humanitarian
official said today as he appealed to the country’s
religious, ethnic and other community leaders to do much
more to try to stop the killings and massive displacement of
people.

At least 315,000 people have fled their homes in
the past seven or eight months, driven by military
operations or sectarian violence that has escalated since a
key Shiite shrine in Samarra was bombed in February,
Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland
told a press briefing in Geneva.

Armed sectarian militias
and death squads murder an average of 100 people every day,
he added, noting that no segment of society was
immune.

“These are police and their recruits, these are
judges, these are lawyers, these are journalists, and there
are increasingly women,” he said. “And the latter group
is particularly targeted for so-called honour killings…
Revenge killings seem now to be totally out of
control.”

There are now thought to be 1.5 million
internally displaced persons (IDPs) within Iraq, as well as
an estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in
neighbouring countries. Each day as many as 2,000 people
cross the border into Syria as the trend accelerates.

Mr.
Egeland said the rising numbers of refugees means Iraq is
experienced a serious ‘brain drain,’ with reports
indicating some universities and hospitals in Baghdad have
lost up to 80 per cent of their professional staff. In
total, a third or more of Iraqi professionals are estimated
to have left their country in recent years.

“Our appeal
goes to everybody who can influence the violence, who can
curb the violence. Religious leaders, ethnic leaders [and]
cultural leaders have to see that this has spiralled totally
out of control – Sunnis being pressured out of Shia areas,
Shias out of Sunni areas. Exchanges of people in the tens of
thousands are happening.

“That means that those who
remain as minorities in areas with such ‘ethnic
engineering,’ as some call it, become increasingly
vulnerable. And you have then an accelerating trend of mass
movement of people. It has to stop and all of those who can
influence it must do their utmost to stop it.”

Mr.
Egeland, who is also the UN’s Emergency Relief
Coordinator, called for more funding – either from donors
or from government budget surpluses – for the world
body’s humanitarian programmes inside Iraq, which cover
areas ranging from water and sanitation to food
distribution.

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